


a certain capacity

by scifive



Category: The Good Place (TV)
Genre: (amongst other reasons), Amnesia, Biphobia Mention, Biting, Blood, Consent Issues, Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, Dubious Consent, Dubious Consent Due To Identity Issues, Dubious Morality, Emotional Manipulation, F/M, Hate Sex, Manipulation, Mild Gore, Minor Violence, Power Imbalance, Psychological Manipulation, Restraints Mention, Riding Right Up Against The Line Of Non-Con/Rape, Season/Series 02 Spoilers, Unhealthy Power Dynamics, briefly mentioned internalised biphobia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-09
Updated: 2017-11-09
Packaged: 2019-01-31 05:50:30
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,222
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12675675
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scifive/pseuds/scifive
Summary: This is the first time it happens. (And the next, and the next, and the next.)





	a certain capacity

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Deadly Sin](https://archiveofourown.org/works/12346185) by [twopinkcarnations](https://archiveofourown.org/users/twopinkcarnations/pseuds/twopinkcarnations). 



> This fic is marked dub-con, in that consent is never explicitly handled within the story itself. All characters are 100% consenting, even in the more ambiguous situations.
> 
> Edited to add: for the sake of clarity, characters within this fic are routinely psychologically manipulated into sexual situations, and arguably cannot give fully-informed consent. While they participate enthusiastically, it can be argued this is not true consent. There are also situations where a character may read as though they are trying to revoke consent, though I would like to say (Voice-Of-God style) that this is not the case, and this has more to do with toxic power dynamics than withdrawal of consent. Consent is usually implied rather than explicitly stated, and, as mentioned, is debatable.
> 
> If these circumstances are not something you wish to read, or unsettle you/make you uncomfortable/distress you in any way, best skip this fic.

This is the first time it happens.

It takes exactly four minutes to go from Eleanor yelling “you’re _forking with us!_ ” to Michael fucking her, with brutal precision, on Chidi’s bed. He’s locked her right hand above her head and against the mattress, his long fingers interlaced with hers, and his other hand is braced (gently, cruelly) on the jut of her hip. He keeps his movements slow, powerful, grin sharp-edged and mocking, as she snarls and fights beneath him. She claws at the skin over his shoulder and his grin stretches wider, teeth bared on the breath of a growl.

Eleanor had agreed to this. She knew what she was getting into (and she may even be convinced that it was her own idea to start with), but, oh, Michael can _taste_ his own satisfaction. Her motive had been so transparent; she had been five feet of almost trembling rage and betrayal, so wildly staggered, and if there’s one thing Eleanor has always done it’s attack to defend. Michael didn’t need nine-dimensional vision to see that she wanted to break him before he breaks _her_ , but she doesn’t know what she’s playing at, doesn’t yet fully understand what he _does_.

There’s a reason his hand is on her hip.

Eleanor is breathless below him, shirt half-on, shuddering with every wild pass of pleasure through her. It doesn’t dim the fury in her eyes, though, or the calculation, as she flexes and twists, determined to break his composure to — to prove something, perhaps, to him or to herself, that at the end of the day she’s the captain of her own soul?

It’s enough to make Michael laugh right into the face of her snarl, and she responds by dragging her nails down his flank with calculated artlessness. She gets a growl for that, and his fingers tighten momentarily, fingertips digging into the back of her hand in a way that will bruise for days, spots the dull colour of dead blood. She gasps out in genuine pain, and he stills his movements.

“Now, now,” he says, using his Welcome To The Good Place voice, and Eleanor’s eyes narrow. It’s a deliberate, ridiculous incongruity: his face settled in the familiar lines of courtesy whilst he’s buried to the hilt in her, whilst he’s using weight and height and strength to pin her, borderline-dangerous, against the mattress. “No need for that.”

“Oh, _fork_ _you_ ,” she snaps, but her breathlessness steals most of the bite. She knows it, too, teeth bared and lip curled, almost incandescent with anger.

“Goodness, such language,” he says mildly, a smile at the back of his teeth, and draws his fingertips across the cut of the muscles inside her hipbone. It’s a tender touch, soft and needlessly cruel in its intimacy. Eleanor knows what he’s doing almost as soon as he starts moving, and the look on her face, _oh—_

Michael moves the pads of his fingers in slow, soothing circles along the sensitive skin on the inside of her hip, her thigh, before gently touching them against her clit. She bucks once, wildly, the fingers of her free hand clamped threateningly around the meat of his tricep, and spits out “Don’t you _dare—_ ”

He dares. It takes a few long minutes of careful movements to drive Eleanor (slowly, inexorably) to gasping incoherence, and she’s digging her nails hard enough into his arm to puncture his skin with small, jagged, crescent-shaped cuts. Her head is pressed back against the mattress, breathing ragged and trying _so_ hard to control herself, trying, trying and _failing_ —

Eleanor comes hissing through her teeth, choking out half a curse-word and blinded by pleasure. It takes her a good minute to come back to herself, breathing hard and dazed, but she hasn’t forgotten where she is. Michael stills and waits for her, braced above her with the fingers of one hand resting softly on her waist, and watches her eyelids until they flicker open. He makes eye contact, holds it for several brutal seconds, and then smiles like a shark. Her mouth is set in a harsh line, eyes dry and glittering, and she looks away first.

Michael’s almost fully-dressed when Eleanor speaks again, fighting her way into a t-shirt. 

“Now what?” she says brusquely, yanking at the hem and refusing to look at him. “I’m not the one who’s wrong here. Now I know, now I’ve figured out your _petty_ little game. So what happens now?”

Michael watches her, watches the shame and humiliation crawl up her aura as much as it visibly crawls up her spine, and feels his smirk become hard-edged. He’s lost the war, sure; but victory in this particular battle alleviates some of the sting, sets back his frustration and rage a few critical notches, and there’s something to bed said about torturing her so carefully, intimately – physically and psychologically and emotionally, and all at once. 

“Now we do it all again,” he says with ghastly cheer, and she jolts back a step.

“We _what?_ ” she says, wide-eyed, and he snaps his fingers—

-

A door opens.

“Eleanor? Come on in.”

-

Bookmark #1 [High priority, core literature]

Eisenberger, N. I. (2012). The neural bases of social pain: Evidence for its shared representations with physical pain. _Psychosomatic Medicine, 74_ (2) _, 126-135._

_Experiences of social rejection or loss have been described as some of the most ‘painful’ experiences that we, as humans, face and perhaps for good reason. Because of our prolonged period of immaturity, the social attachment system may have co-opted the pain system, borrowing the pain signal to prevent the detrimental consequences of social separation. This review summarizes a program of research that has explored the idea that experiences of physical and social pain rely on shared neural substrates._

_-_

There are three things you should understand about Michael, and you need to know all of them first.

Well. In as best an order as can be approximated:

The second thing you need to know about Michael is that he is very, very good at his job.

Perhaps that’s up for debate (some of his colleagues would certainly say so), but Michael maintains that he’s simply taking the more subtle approach. And, in the long run, the more lucrative approach, speaking in terms of the special economics of the ‘bad place’.

The bad place has its own traditions. They’re somewhat on-the-nose, but also crudely effective. There’s the neighbourhood filled with the Spider Enema Volcanoes; there’s the neighbourhood with the flying bears with two mouths; the neighbourhood with the cannibal dentists with hypodermics instead of fingers; and countless others. 

(Are you seeing a theme here?)

Michael’s colleagues seem happy enough in their work, and the humans in their charge are certainly enduring a height of misery and terror of which they could not conceive, back when they were alive. _But_ , Michael argues, there’s two parts to this: the first is the problem that humans can, and will, adapt to anything. Oh, not the actual tortures themselves, no — the first time being boiled alive in a cauldron of molten aluminum is very much like the last, all told — but humans are a social bunch. As far as he has observed, Michael finds humans weirdly resilient, oddly communicative, and it’s not unknown for them to develop their own little bonds between each other, forged in the heart of a pain so extreme that words can’t cope. He knows for a fact that Brendan recently had to deal with two humans who, in between screams, held a cogent conversation about their kids’ sports teams whilst being slowly dissolved in gastric acid. Communities in hell: who’d have known?

The second part, Michael adds, is that left to their own devices, human beings will construct tortures so elaborate, so devastating, that it awes even him. And _then_ humans will inflict them willingly not only on each other, but also on _themselves_. Given the choice between reliving that one memory where they publicly wet their pants in fifth grade recess, or spending time in a cage with one of Michael’s co-workers bearing a very large cheesegrater and some unconventional ideas, humans will actually _jump into the cage_ with a murmur of gratitude for the choice. There’s also a special horror to be found in the eyes of humans who’ve embroiled themselves so deeply in their own pain that they can’t be reached any more; Chidi, Michael remembers with a wry chuckle, had ended up here _because_ he tortured himself so effectively whilst alive.

All of this was somewhat baffling to Michael until he’d thought to ask the experts: the humans themselves. Human beings are case studies in misery, and Michael has made it a mission to learn from the best. Amusingly, no-one observes humans better than humans, and he studies them, studies them studying themselves. He keeps a file on his research, actually, complete with bookmarks and annotations. There’s literally decades of peer-reviewed research on how best to torture a human, produced _by_ humans, and Michael decides that yes, he's learning from the masters.

(What do surgeons, soldiers and psychologists have in common?

They take people apart.

Michael is now all of this and more.)

Michael’s early attempts were all successful enough to capture the attention of his boss. The key ones were: 1) the one where Michael set Aaron Feigenbaum loose in a dimly-lit Wal-Mart, filled with people he hadn’t seen since high school; 2) the one where Lena Hodžić was forced to do endless team-building exercises where her co-workers somehow were all of her ex-girlfriends; and 3) the one where Prisha Balakrishna had to spend eternity on an unmoving, standing-room-only 7 a.m. commuter train, with a flat cell phone battery and knowing this was all in service to a job she herself had chosen. 

(For a truly startling number of people, the quickest and most effective torture was simply retail work.)

At the beginning, Michael muses, it was easy enough to set up Eleanor, Chidi, Tahani and Jason to pick each other to pieces. Humans know and break humans like nothing else, and Michael put this to gruesome, effective work, watching them shun and reject each other, forming bonds only to use them to manipulate and control, to drag each other down. And the beauty of all of this, his research, his ideas, is that they would do all of this without Michael having to lift a finger. So much more elegant, so much more amusing and — critically — _eternal_. No more rotating humans through neighbourhoods, no more moments of humanity in the dark as connections are made through the sharing of distress. Just endless, low-grade misery, the power and the glory, for ever and ever. Amen.

-

So:

Michael _will_ admit to that first time being the product of a hundred and forty-two cycles of non-stop, unbroken frustration. After you’ve tried and failed that many times, it’s bound to get a little personal, after all, and the temptation to simply take it out of her hide — to _pin_ her, to make her understand _who was in control_ , for once — had simply been too much to resist. It had been one of his better moments, actually: Eleanor is someone who wears her triggers on the outside, if you know where to look, and pressing the right ones so that she came to him willingly, freely (and in such a way that she thought she might be able to _win_ ) had been a powerful thing, had left him heady with pleasure. It certainly salves his wounded pride enough that he starts iteration one-forty-three with renewed vigour.

One-forty-two is the first time. It’s by far from the last.

The next time it happens is iteration one-sixty-seven, and this time, Eleanor figures it all out when he's inside of her.

She’s pressed down into her mattress, chest-down and hips rolling languidly against Michael’s when she suddenly stiffens. Michael doesn’t even pause; he slams his hands down over her wrists, stills suddenly inside of her, and lets her form the words sitting, horrified and furious, behind her tongue.

(It’s been a slow, torturous seduction to get her here, careful and managed, spinning out her misery — hey, he has to have _some_ fun — and this is just a bonus.)

“You— it’s not— _this isn’t the good place_ ,” Eleanor chokes out, fingers curling helplessly in the sheet below her. Abruptly, she pulls at his grip, and gasps out when he tightens his fingers. Would Michael give her the time, the days would bleed together with long, yellow bruises across the delicate bones of her wrists.

“No,” he says, grave sympathy layered over laughter. “No, it’s not. _Clever_ girl.” His knees are between her thighs and he pushes one leg higher, forces her open even further. He fucks her in long, slow strokes as she snarls, torn between the relentless pleasure and the rage. Michael doesn’t hold himself back this time; he’s worked hard for his reward, won his victory even if he’s (as usual) lost the larger campaign, and drives into her brutally as he works her ever closer to the edge. The pattern is easier to determine this time, her body more familiar under his own, and it only takes a couple of minutes of Michael’s fingers on her clit to trip her into orgasm, stunned and desperately furious, _don’t you dare_.

Eleanor is just tripping over into that hot white pleasure when he sinks his teeth hard into the edge of her shoulder. She’s too far gone, though, and comes with a shout, blood trickling down into the sheets. Michael follows her over only a second or so later.

Well, he’s only human, after all.

Hah. 

-

Well, as we’re here, here’s the first thing you should know about Michael: his body is as human as yours.

Yes, alright, Michael himself isn’t actually human; he’s ten dimensions of hatred, fury and anger made of magnetism, shaped space and boundless will — all folded down into the shape of a neurotic human man. But oh, Michael will say it himself, in iteration eight-oh-two: they're given bodies, they're all given bodies, in order to best approximate pain for their victims. There's no point in doing it by halves, after all. Much like their subordinate, Michael’s superiors understand the value in thorough, careful, considered research, so all the synapses map the same as humans do, all his borrowed neurones carry their chattering pulses to the same nodes, pain and pleasure alike. An architect may need to be _retired_ one day, after all, and what's the point if they can't _feel_ those fires of the billion suns? Immortal evil in mortal flesh, tireless and unaging.

(Whilst Michael is not especially attached to his body, he’ll comfortably admit to a certain degree of amusement. It’s coded heavily, if you know where to look: sharp eyes, features you could break yourself against, frame tall and broad and deceptively strong, hidden under tweed and glasses — violence shrouded in the illusion of safety. It’s such a beautiful mirror of his own little world he can’t help but be a touch enamoured by the whole thing.)

Michael feels pleasure and pain just as intensely as me, as you, as anyone. He allows himself the occasional orgasm, to utilise that heady cocktail of neurotransmitters and hormones into a hot red rush that swallows up conscious thought, but he doesn’t forget who he is. Still, he won’t always come — sometimes rebooting Eleanor mid-fuck is the most satisfying way to reset, seeing the extra half-moment of confusion on her eyes when she wakes, how the way she's suddenly empty reels her — but when he _does_ , he likes to leave a mark. 

So this time, as every time, his orgasm tastes like blood.

–

Here in one-sixty-seven, Eleanor’s angrier, after; she’s had less time to process, emotions still raw and on the surface, and she stabs her feet back into her jeans with trembling hands gracing the waistband. Michael watches her as she glares at him, smiling almost ( _almost_ ) gently, fixing his bow-tie with precise movements. Her eyes track those movements, a curl to her lip she doesn't appear to know is there.

“Fork you,” she’s snarling, yanking on her shirt with hands that shake and flex. The bite mark on the furthest curve of her shoulder is livid, faintest traces of crimson glinting in crushed skin. “Fork. _You_. Is _that_ was this was all about?”

“Oh, goodness no, this was just a little bit of fun,” he says, charm in every syllable. Her lip jerks into a snarl, and she’s rounding on him, small hands tightening into smaller fists, unsung violence in the shape of her shoulders, when he snaps his fingers.

- 

Here, importantly, is a corollary: Michael’s body is human, but so is Eleanor’s.

-

Iteration one-sixty-eight begins like the hundred and sixty-seven before them. Michael plays gracious host, bringing Eleanor, Chidi, Jason and Tahani into his little world with all the subtle malice he’s learned from hundreds of years of humanity’s own-brand cruelty. It’s all going approximately to plan.

“And this is Tahani and her soulmate, Jianyu. They’re your next door neighbours,” Michael says, smiling into the sun as he adjusts his bow-tie with precise fingers. On cue, Tahani gushes about Eleanor’s cute, adorable, tiny, wonderful, tiny cottage, all casual condescension that never fails to make the small muscle in Eleanor’s jaw twitch. 

Only this time Eleanor’s not really paying attention. The smile is there (she’s nothing if not good at wearing a mask, after all), but her focus is on Michael, eyes fixed unblinkingly on his fingers as he smooths over the tie, her lip absently curling.

It’s gone after a second, just a second; he watches her blink, shake her head slightly as if to clear a daydream, and relax her features into a more natural expression. 

Ah, he thinks. _Ah_.

-

Bookmark #6,724 [tangential but interesting; refer to memory modification catalogue]

Squire, L. R. (2009). The Legacy of Patient H.M. for Neuroscience. _Neuron, 61_ (1), 6-9.

_[…]Later it became appreciated that motor skills are but a subset of a larger domain of skill-like abilities, all of which are preserved in amnesia. The demonstration of a fully preserved ability to learn the perceptual skill of mirror reading suggested a distinction between two broad classes of knowledge: declarative and procedural (Cohen and Squire, 1980). Declarative memory is what is meant when the term “memory” is used in everyday language, i.e., conscious knowledge of facts and events. Procedural memory refers to skill-based knowledge that develops gradually but with little ability to report what is being learned. In the years that followed, other preserved learning abilities began to be reported for amnesic patients, and the perspective shifted to a framework that accommodated multiple (i.e., more than two) memory systems._

-

Michael tracks that a little more carefully after one-sixty-eight, and starts to see something interesting: the way Eleanor and Chidi fall into each other’s orbit sooner, every time; trust comes smoothly and easily between them, old patterns and habits forming with speed that the memory reset should not allow. Tahani is quicker to find contrition, Jason faster to find his heart, and Michael begins to harbour some suspicions that wiping their software, so to speak, is missing some steady, incremental change to their hardware.

Eleanor bears this out as the iterations roll frustratingly on, and Michael’s fascination with her becomes more and more physical.

She _learns_ him, that's the thing. Some time around iteration two-forty, she’s rolling her hips against him, riding him viciously with her fingernails dug into his chest, and a particular twist startles a snarling, guttural growl from him. Seven iterations later, he has her in the exact same position, and she does it straight away — like instinct. (Like a memory, he wonders.) In retaliation, he rears up and pulls her head back by her hair, sucks a bite into her throat, and drags his thumb against her clit in a motion with which he's now all-too familiar. She comes twenty seconds later, snarling like a tiger. 

As above, so below, after all, and she remembers, somehow. Remembers the angles of his body, its ways, its undeniability. Somehow.

- 

And anyway. Here’s the third thing to know about Michael: he honestly wasn’t expecting any of this to be as effective as it was. That, in itself, goes a long way to explaining much of what comes after.

He didn’t know, back in iteration one-forty-two, quite what a special torture that fucking Eleanor would reveal itself to be. It’s almost spectacular in its simplicity. There’s only one rule: she must always _choose_ it, freely and without restriction, regardless of the machinations it took to get her there. Force is antithetical to the whole idea, even if manipulation isn’t. 

It tends to work out in one of two ways.

Fucking her almost violently once she’s joined the dots brings her out in a terror and a fury so fierce that it chokes her; she rages against his immovability, rips, shred, bites, twists, like it might help her at all.There’s a special rage reserved just for him like this, you see, when Eleanor’s guilt and shame is so acute that he feels he could live on just that alone. She’s always _better_ by then, fresh lessons on morality and personhood sunk into her bones and her brain, and it’s like fuel on a fire. Once, above him, she rears back and slaps him hard across the face, knees locked against his sides, his hands biting bruises into her thighs.

(Two iterations later, slateblank and fresh, he takes it out of her in trade.)

It’s a different flavour when he spins it out, makes her circle him, brings her in close. That’s a special, slow-burn misery, fear and blame and sin, and it’s the only situation where she’s ever worked it our _during_ sex.

She works it out mid-fuck more than once, actually. The next time it happens, he has her bent over the edge of one of Tahani’s thousands of spare beds, and it’s easy enough to lock her arm behind her back at the tell-tale stiffening of her shoulders. She's an easy lay, and he knows her like a book.

“ _Shirt_ ,” she gasps, and her whole abdomen flexes tight. “Shirt, _shirt._ It’s you, isn’t it? It’s all you. This isn’t the _good_ place—”

Oh, it’s good. It’s so good. He pins her to the bed with effortless strength, laughing right into her skull and pressed up against her back. He lets one of her hands go, fingers slithering under her stomach and down to stroke alongside her clitoris. She pushes at him uselessly with her free hand, fingers scratching against the skin of his hip, and he breathes a laugh into her ear.

“Get — get _off_ me,” she snarls desperately, hissing a gasp between her teeth as he tweaks his fingers _just so_.

“Shhh, shhh,” he says softly, kindly, _right_ into her ear, and he can pinpoint the moment when the pleasure becomes too intense, when self-serving signals outweigh horrified realisation. She comes shuddering, biting back a cry, sharp horror under her pleasure.

Michael’s fairly sure she works it out that way a third time, too. Sometime around iteration three-oh-five, Eleanor’s sat on the edge of his desk and he’s kneeling, fully-clothed, her thighs over his shoulders, the heels of her feet pressing hard into his back. He’s drawing broad, lazy strokes along her labia with his tongue, hands holding her gently by the inner thighs and she’s actually shaking, breathing choppy and gasping. It’s the fastest she’s ever peaked, even if it’s not the most intense reaction she’s ever had, and Michael’s enjoying this new type of control, this faux-submission, as the only one in the know. 

There’s a moment, just a moment, though, when Eleanor threads the fingers of her left hand through his hair. Michael chances a look up, curling his tongue against her clitoris, to see her watching him with eyes and an aura that are suspiciously lust-masked. He sucks then, briefly, and she comes apart, breathing out a gasp that has a scream stifled in it.

When he stands and crowds against her, tipping her head up with his fingers to kiss her — slowly, thoroughly — she breathes into him and reciprocates, pressing her hands into his chest, fingers wrapping tightly into the material of his shirt. He keeps one hand on the sweet curve of her waist, the other resting gently on her collarbone, close enough to the throat he can move fast if he needs to. His hands and hers, each on the edge of violence with an amusing degree of plausible deniability, and Michael works hard to keep himself from grinning into her mouth. Eleanor says nothing, sweating and vulnerable. It’s an odd, quiet little moment.

Eleanor blows this iteration apart the next day in fury and betrayal, and he’s left wondering about that one. 

But anyway; we’re getting side-tracked.

This longer-term planning bears its own reward. Setting up Tahani as Eleanor’s soulmate (four-twelve), for instance, has its own unique benefits, and one he capitalises on with ruthless abandon. Eleanor has only ever really _fucked_ women; never entertained the thought of a relationship with a woman, never been able to break from the more familiar path of dating men. Setting her up with Tahani sets her spinning wild, freaking out and clawing around her for something she could consider normal. 

It’s blissful to watch, it really is. Michael has her coming _and_ going, to to speak, on the back of her sexuality crisis; Eleanor pinballs relentlessly between her genuine attraction to Tahani and heteronormative panic, and Michael is there, every time, soothing words and gentle hands, kind fingers in the small of her back that _oh_ , make her breath stop like she’s been slapped. It’s not hard to plant the seeds, to make her think it’s all her own idea.

He fucks her three times before she figures it out, and each time he leaves her in more of a mess than before. 

The last time, oh, and he has a feel for this now — she’s so close to understanding what he is again. So he draws it out, a little; uses tongue and fingers and himself, watches her guilt be subsumed under high-intensity pleasure, whole body sparking like an electrical storm. Eleanor comes thrice before he’s finished with her, and she rides out the aftershocks slowly, very slowly, trembling. There are tears in her eyes by the end, and _oh_ , it’s so beautiful.

Michael watches her while she’s coming back down, fingers stroking delicately over the small of her back, tracing small circles and dragging the edge of one nail over the bumps of her spine. Her skin rises in goosebumps even now and Eleanor shudders, strongly, undefended, like an exposed nerve. She keeps her eyes shut.

Michael files that away for future reference. 

And, well.

-

Bookmark #[new - to be sorted later]

Open Science Collaboration. (2015). Estimating the reproducibility of psychological science. _Science, 349_ (6251).

_Reproducibility is a core principle of scientific progress[…] Scientific claims should not gain credence because of the status or authority of their originator but by the replicability of their supporting evidence. Scientists attempt to transparently describe the methodology and resulting evidence used to support their claims. Other scientists agree or disagree whether the evidence supports the claims, citing theoretical or methodological reasons or by collecting new evidence. Such debates are meaningless, however, if the evidence being debated is not reproducible._

-

Michael doesn’t fuck her _every_ iteration; it’s not appropriate every time, won’t fit into the flow of his little world well enough, and he genuinely doesn’t let his own, smaller enjoyments get in the way of the bigger picture. But it _works_ , you see, and so he keeps coming back to it. And besides, it’s not unusual for someone like him to take a Special Interest in a particular human. Michael is known for his craftsmanship, his attention to detail.

He actually learns a lot just based on where she won’t let him touch her. Eleanor is _incredibly_ sensitive in the small of her back—

_—he touches her there before she can stop him, backs of his nails across warm skin. She’s naked, panting, and she shivers, back muscles flexing as she trips into an orgasm so sudden and sweet that she actually takes nearly ninety seconds to level out. The things he'd done to her after that were purely for his own pleasure, rough and intense—_

—her nipples, almost startlingly so—

 _—she’s even angrier than normal, fighting through her consent, like tearing him apart was more important to her than the sex. (He wouldn’t be surprised.) He moves in a single sinuous movement, trapping her hands underneath his own and lacing their fingers together, a mockery of intimacy. She bucks and snarls under him, trying to get a knee into his gut or his groin. In response, he curls his tongue around her nipple and, inspired, bites very gently. She sounds like she’s_ dying _, feels her fingers go lax inside his, and he will find she’s so_ wet—

—in her inner thigh—

_—she’s always pushed his hands away from her thighs when she can, and he wonders, so this time he drags his fingers slowly from behind her knee and into her hip joint. She trembles on an exhale, hips tilting automatically, and he savours the startled eye contact she makes, wants so badly to see the look on her face if (when?) he sinks his teeth into the long, unsteady muscles there—_

—the line of her _throat_ , of all things—

_—frustrated and raw about the way she’s broken this iteration apart within a day and within her hands, Michael holds her head back by her hair and drags his teeth in a hot, wet scrape from clavicle to jaw. She’s upright in his lap with her abdomen pressed into his own, angry and breathless, pushing at him just as much as her thighs pull him into her. But then she actually chokes out a moan, and he can see by the sudden whiteness of her knuckles that it was involuntary, and he grins, and bites gently into her neck under her ear, feels her entire body hitch, her back arching, her internal muscles tightening—_

—and so many others, small sensitivities that add up into big moments, cumulative to critical mass.

One iteration (six-forty-something, Michael thinks), Eleanor has (as ever) made the connections and come to him in her rage, fury and hot violence in her disaster of a cottage. By the end of that confrontation he’s got her pinned under him, long body arcing over her back and moving in and out of her with slow, sinuous liquidity, and a lazy inevitability that implies he could go on like this for hours.

She’s pressed cheek-down into the mattress, eyeing him hatefully from one side whilst winding up tighter and tighter. She’s frustrated and wet and going absolutely nowhere, and she thrashes for a moment under him, snarling and spitting, trying to raise herself up for the leverage it affords. He chuckles and leans in until his mouth is only an inch or so from her ear, forcing her right hand into an armlock against her shoulder-blades. Her left hand grabs fruitlessly back at him before she slams it, incandescently angry, against the mattress.

“Now, now, _Ellie_ ,” Michael says, all malevolent courtesy, and watches that left hand clench in the sheets. 

“My _name_ is _Eleanor_ ,” she snarls back, and tries to twist, tries to slam that fist into his face—

He snaps his fingers.

Next iteration, he smiles and he twinkles and does all the things good old Heavenly Architect Michael is meant to do. He tells Eleanor about the town, about the people, shows her courteously into four different pretzel shops, and smiles benignly at his kingdom.

“Each neighbourhood contains three hundred and twenty-two people who blend together into a perfect harmonic community. You’re guaranteed to find a place here, Ellie,” he says, hands clasped behind his back, kind smile all the way up to his eyes, and he watches her left hand tighten slowly into a fist.

“Oh, I really prefer Eleanor,” she says with a smile of her own, but her expression is slightly too vacant to be honest. Her entire aura burns with uneasy confusion.

“Of course,” he says, effortless charm. “Eleanor. I do apologise.” And they move on towards the cottage, Michael staying comfortably on her left side, and he watches the way that fist locks in and stays. Eleanor sneaks glances at it once, twice, thrice, puzzlement layered under her I-Belong-Here facade, before it comes loose.

The satisfaction in that might _burn_ him, if it could. Still: she’s learning somehow, and that alone indicates there are enough dangers in this whole enterprise that he tries to remember to be careful. 

He doesn’t _always_ manage it.

In iteration seven-twenty-three, Eleanor has half the puzzle pieces. She’s worked out that Michael’s not what he seems, and has come to him furious but freely, bargaining for Chidi who is currently awaiting ‘extradition’ to ‘the Bad Place’ for crimes not his own. It’s then and there that she works out the rest, and Eleanor’s guilt becomes subsumed by a rage and betrayal so blinding that Michael can see nothing else in her. She is glorious, and she is wounded, and it really shouldn’t come as a surprise when violence enters the equation.

Even for a human she’s not much of a threat, but she _is_ smart. She gets close and naked before going for Michael’s eyes, biting and savage and trying to take him apart, like she’d ever be strong enough, like just trying might be enough to assuage everything she carries around with her. Purely in human terms, it’s a daft move; Michael’s better than a foot taller, older, broader and heavier, and of course, critically, _not human_.

Eleanor wants to be recognised, that much is obvious; it’s easy to see in the set of her spine, in the raw shine in her eyes. So it’s a special, deliberate cruelty when he ignores Eleanor’s thrashing, and uses his discarded bow-tie to knot her left hand to her headboard. He then resumes fucking her open with slow, lazy movements, easy and unhurried, like she’d not even tried. His hand is stroking her clit with practiced motions, and she's burning _wild_ , so desperate, soaking wet and enraged to the edge of tears. He's been careful to wind her up like this, set her body going, and is just enjoying the twin pleasures of her frustration and his own flesh. Sex _is_ pleasurable, he will admit, the sheer physicality more fun than he was expecting.

But:

There’s a moment when Eleanor checks right out of her own head, raw pleasure eating its way up her spine. She shivers hard for a moment, head tipped back and gasping with an undesigned honesty, baring her throat. As though in reflex, her free hand snatches at his chest, desperate, grabbing into the material that lies over the space his heart should be.

And for the first time, for the only time, Eleanor _begs_.

“Please,” she gasps, “ _please_ , I need to— _please—_ ”

The growl that comes right out of Michael is unplanned, too much, and he feels his edges blur, his outline _shiver_. Just for a second, he trembles under a pleasure so intense it nearly undoes him, feeling limbs he doesn’t technically have flex, feeling his skin ripple and his eyes darken. 

He claws for his control, smile wiped right off his face, and for once, he’s the one snarling at her. She comes brutally sixty seconds later with his teeth in her throat, blood pooling in the hollows under her collarbones, and his fingers snapping out the reboot. 

It’s a win. She’ll never know it, damn her, but it’s a win. Michael’s forgotten to be careful. 

It’s also symptomatic of a larger issue, he’ll admit — her victory over him came from the same place as her victory over his world: Eleanor is _selfish_. That selfishness saves her. Every time. (Well, that one with Jason—) She’s the only one of them who’s internalised that the best bet is to observe how people act, and not what they say; her survival mechanisms are strong, and they’re not much dulled by the relentless cheery pastels of the Good Place neighbourhood.

Eleanor might be able to learn, Michael decides, but so can he.

–

In terms of Michael’s overall plans for Eleanor, Chidi, Tahani and Jason, however, things don’t really improve.

–

New folder: Research post iteration 800. Bookmark #1

Glenn, H.S. & Nelsen, J. (1988). _Raising Self-Reliant Children in a Self-Indulgent World: Seven Building Blocks for Developing Capable Young People._ Rocklin, California: Prima Publishing  & Communications.

_Flexibility is the ability to bend when we find ourselves in unworkable positions. A universal characteristic of insanity is inflexibly doing the same thing over and over while hoping for different results. Flexibility in the face of changing circumstances, by contrast, is a hallmark of mental health._

–

Michael is someone who takes his research seriously. He’s wearing a human body, for all its pains and pleasures, and here’s something for you to think about: so are Michael’s co-workers.

(As above, so below. This is important.)

Michael’s colleagues are not humans, but they’re all wearing one, in one shape or another. And here’s the thing: some aspects of their nature _have_ to be translated; there has to be some room for communication for them to do their job. They speak using human mouths, using human tongues, using human languages.

Using human _faces_.

All their malice and ambition is filtered through human expression, their essence translated into body language and facial tics they can’t always quite control. Michael is _good_ at humans, is good at reading them, and has seen the long-term effects of his failures spinning out. Vicky and the others are not as subtle as they think.

Michael doesn't know how many rounds he has left when he snaps his fingers for the eight hundredth time, but he's got at least one more. It might be enough to make sure he survives this, he figures, and sets to work. In a manner of speaking, anyway; he doesn’t actually lift a finger this time. It’s easy to just let it wind out of control right from the off, casual implosions, Chidi and Eleanor both making their way to the medium place and back again. The chaos gives him enough time to dig into the options a little, but he doesn’t expect what he finds.

Michael is _stuck_.

He simply can’t think of a way to bend Vicky and her retinue enough that he can retain some control, or at least not end up a silenced lacky, reined to heel on the threat of blackmail. He just _can’t_.

Trust humans to come up with the weirdest solutions, even one as— well. Even _Jason_. It goes like this:

• One day, Donkey Doug and I got into a fight because I'd framed his girlfriend for boogie board theft.  
• So he started a new dance crew called Hashtag DougLife and immediately challenged us to a dance-off.  
• He said, ‘Meet us inside the abandoned orange juice factory at midnight.’ That night, as the clock struck twelve, me and my crew came together with a determination we had never shown before.  
• And slashed all their tires.  
• It was dope.  
• The end.  
• By Jason Mendoza.

Jason, as is his _very annoying habit_ , is not entirely wrong. It’s off the curve. It may not work. But he’s got at least one more iteration to work out the kinks, maybe more, and it’s worth a shot.

It takes Eleanor, Chidi and Tahani another forty-five minutes or so to find them, bursting into Eleanor’s cottage with all the self-righteous affrontery that his betrayal affords them. There’s plenty of yelling, lots of denial (Tahani) and stomachaches (Chidi), and Michael switches it up, goes for broke.

“You’re going to act like you've been rebooted and pretend that Vicky and the others are torturing you,” he finishes, palms held out placatingly. “How’re we feeling about that? Nervous? Excited? Rebellious? Um, murder-y?”

Not terribly invested, as it turns out. He can’t quite get them all to agree on anything — if anything, they’re all pulling in completely different directions. For all his little victories over Eleanor, he’s still not got any answers for his problem. What is it they _want_ , aside from him to stop torturing them? 

It takes a good few minutes before Eleanor rather visibly loses her temper, and kicks everyone else out. She stands and watches Michael, mouth a tight line, as the other three leave. 

“Look, are you sure—” begins Chidi hesitantly.

“I’m fine, Chidi,” Eleanor replies, eyes never leaving Michael. Her arms are crossed across her chest, and she narrows her eyes at him as soon as Chidi is out the door.

“So what’s this about,” she says flatly, watching him without blinking. “You’ve not exactly been clear about what you get out of this. Don’t try to lie to a liar, man, you are _not_ gonna have a good time.”

Michael sighs, rubbing at the bridge of his nose, before clasping his hands behind his back. “Frankly, I’d like to _not_ be disassembled and burned on a billions suns, whilst my essence spends eternity rooming with lava snakes that have no sense of personal boundaries,” he says honestly. “Look, Eleanor, what I’m interested in is — what can I do for _you?_ What would convince you to come on board with Team Cockroach—”

“ _Stop_ calling us that—”

“—so we can all escape this with our skins intact? Our very delicate, flammable skins,” he adds.

Eleanor watches him for a moment, critically, saying nothing. Michael does his best to look attentive and inoffensive.

“Get us out,” she says abruptly, staring him down. “That’s the price. Get us out. For good.”

“Oh sure, no problem,” Michael says earnestly, eyebrows rising. “I can get you to the medium place, if we’re careful—”

“No,” Eleanor interrupts. Her voice is deadly serious. “Get us out to the good place. The _real_ good place. All of us.”

Michael stares right back, incredulous.

“The _real_ good pl— are you _joking?_ ” he demands, aghast. “I can score you all a trip to the medium place, sure, but the _real_ good place — the admin _alone_ —”

“That’s the deal,” she says, grit in her tone. Michael’s heard it enough time to know she’s not forking around. Her spine is like iron.

“I’m gonna need to think about this,” he says, pacing the length of the living room and rubbing the fingers of his right hand absently over his temple. This is not a small ask. “I’m gonna need to figure out a few things—”

“Then you figure it out,” says Elenor, steely-eyed, and she actually stalks towards him, jabbing her finger into his chest. “You figure it out and set it up, and _then_ I’ll talk the others into agreeing with your little scheme.”

Michael looks down at the finger pressed against his chest, and then raises his eyebrow at her. Eleanor has always been brash with him, brutal and upfront to whatever means served her end, and this is no different. Emboldened, she pushes harder against him, and Michael gives ground with equal parts bafflement and amusement. She’s trying to back him up against the clown nook, extra bravado to make up the comical height difference. Michael doesn't even try to pretend it works.

“I'm watching you,” she hisses, jaded and cynical only the way that human trash-fires can be. “I know there's another game you're playing. The others might be willing to gamble on you, but _I_ know your type, sunshine—”

“Because you're just like me,” Michael offers. His voice is polite, maybe even interested, but his sudden grin is jagged and deliberately cruel. Eleanor jerks back half a step, yanking her hand away from him on instinct, and he doesn't even pause when pressing forward to match her step-for-step. “Still, if you want to _guarantee_ my help, there's always trades to be made.” 

At her flatly confused stare, he lets his eyes flick briefly to the bed at the back of the room.

“No, _nuh-uh_ , you forkin’ perv,” she bites out, looking righteous and furious, everything he’s ever expected of her since she arrived. But Michael _knows_ her now, knows her by every inch of her, and it's too easy to slide right into her space, crowding her in with his shoulders and the brutally sharp line of his grin.

“Are you sure?” he asks quietly, kindly, and touches his hand quick-fast against the small of her back. It's easy to pull her against him, smooth and painless and wholly undeniable; it's even easier to slip that same hand under her plaid shirt and move his thumb in a steady, confident sweep against that one spot in the small of her back.

Eleanor blinks twice, hard, pupils blowing out. Michael holds eye contact even as she startles, and his smile is inhuman. He knows from several encounters and four brutal slaps that this only works if he doesn't give her time to think, so he presses his advantage, pulls her backwards, pushes her gently (inexorably) into the wall between two clown portraits. He’s once again surprised at the height difference — she bears herself taller than her five feet, and it’s not until he’s crowding into her like this, blocking her light, that he really appreciates how stark the differences are between them.

He has the timings down to the quarter-second. His thumb strokes lightly across the skin at the small of her back, and he feels the fine hair there standing on end. It’s not quite enough, not yet, so he dips his head and nips once, very carefully, at the skin below the angle of her jaw.

She’d already been drawing breath to respond, and the words are coming forward just as his teeth close on her skin. What should be a sharp demand stutters, becomes unsettled and startled with half a gasp at the feeling of his teeth against her throat: “Get _off_  m— _hhahh_ — me…”

Michael’s released her even before she's finished speaking. “Fair enough,” he says, hands withdrawn and straightening up with an innocent smile, voice light. “I won’t push you. You’ve made yourself clear.” He retreats back a few long steps, hands held palm-out and contrite

This is it, right here: this is what Michael gambles on. The route to Eleanor’s exit is clear. She can make for the door, or she can shout and yell, and Michael meant what he said (he so often does) — he’ll leave if she asks. One rule: free and without restriction.

Humans, though. So quick to learn. _(Somehow.)_

Eleanor hasn’t moved. She might almost appear frozen, if it weren’t for her quickened breathing, her hands in half-fists and flexing slightly. 

Michael tilts his head and, without breaking eye contact, smiles.

She moves then, jerking towards him with her hands coming up like she doesn’t know if she wants to grab him or _hit him_ , knock that goddamn smirk off his face either way. It’s all the consent he needs. 

His own hands come up as he’s striding in to meet her, slamming her back against the wall, and he kisses her almost like he’s biting at her. She bites back, hard reflex as her hands scrabble at the hem of his shirt, and he knows he’s got her. And oh, this is new; there’s never been an incident where he’s fucked Eleanor with her knowing _everything,_ with her having some (any) understanding of the true scope of what he is. It’s new and it’s not, same old joy in same old triggers, and he feels his borrowed blood heat up, radioactive.

They stumble over their own steps in the half-struggle to the bed. He’s initially not even sure they’re going to make it that far, but he manages to kick his heel against the hidden button, drags her up the newly-revealed stairs (“—son of a _bench—_ ”), and gets his knees between hers before she pulls him over her.

There’s a brief struggle over who’s on top. (Michael lets her fight for a few moments; she doesn’t have to know she won’t win.) He drags his fingernails down the small of her back, runs his thumbs carelessly over the undersides of her breasts when they wrestle her shirt off, and the pass of his hand over her inner thigh is not as casual as he makes it seem. It all works, of course it all works, he knows her now, knows her down to the very bones — muscle and sinew, familiar and new, blood-hot against his palms. He uses his entire frame to trap Eleanor in with the ease of long practice, and strokes fingers along the muscles inside her hipbones, feels her arch suddenly against him. That gives him space to move, to settle the fingers of one hand against the small of her back, to once more draw steady, lazy circles. The other smooths up her ribcage, thumb circling a peaked nipple, and she opens a gasp right into his waiting mouth.

He kisses her slowly, deceptively soft, tongues hot and wet. It’s a distraction, though; he doesn’t let it slow down, doesn’t let _her_ slow down — that way lies slightly more violence than he wants to handle — and carefully (firmly) presses one knee into her thigh to spread her open. The fingers he slides between her legs come away slippery from the first touch, liquid heat. 

Eleanor makes a bitten-off noise, and her hips jerk once. Michael allows no respite, no time to adapt; his thumb slides alongside her clit and presses gently, circling and slick. The noise that comes out of Eleanor then is too shocked to be a sigh, too breathy to be a moan, and he grins like a wolf against her mouth.

Well, _that_ pisses her off.

She’s fighting before he knows it, clawing at his skin and snarling right into his face. It’s turbulent, but it doesn’t really slow him down. He keeps his thumb touched to her clit and slips two fingers right into her, stroking gently, come-hither. Eleanor’s so wet it’s _frictionless,_ and she comes white-knuckled, hissing between her teeth, hatred glittering in her eyes. Michael breathes a laugh through a grin and slides himself into her without giving her time to regroup. She chokes out a breath that contains pleasure and frustration in roughly equal measure, and he rolls his pelvis with a long, smooth stroke that feels an awful lot like coming home. 

It’s considerably more aggressive from that moment out.

Michael’s ugly-laughing every time she can't bury a gasp inside a snarl, her breath rasping with with pleasure and exertion, fighting for some kind of dominance. She catches on quick that insults only spur him on, that fighting to be on top slows him down, that she can raise welts and scratch out grooves of his skin under her nails. But she can’t quite get the upper hand — it's too easy for him, and he's learned her, and she remembers his body with some deep, primal horror. 

Eleanor rakes her fingers hard down his back and against his sides. Michael’s stolen synapses mistranslate the brutal shock of it, and the growl that rattles out of him is guttural and incongruously deep. That freezes her for a moment. Michael’s drive is relentless, however, and he uses his leverage to stroke alongside her clit _just as_ he bites down, carefully, on a nipple. It's all too much, too intense, and she's coming again, hard and against her wishes, clawing and snarling and blind.

This second time dazes her more than the first. It gives Michael maybe sixty seconds of her pliant and unresisting in his arms, and he uses it — drags her up off the bed, twists them around until she’s bracing shaky hands on his chest just to stay upright.

Michael’s done letting her pretend she doesn’t want this. 

Eleanor’s eyes are closed, breath stuttering a little in her chest. She’s coming around, slowly, but even now her hips are moving in tiny, sex-dumb motions, a barely-noticeable grind. Michael’s not even sure she’s aware she’s doing it.

She becomes aware pretty damn fast. Eleanor's eyes snap open and fix on his, brow drawn down, angry and hateful even through the backwash of chemicals lighting up her entire nervous system. 

She sets a steady, selfish pace, and Michael’s happy to let her; his hands rest gently on the curve of her waist, occasionally stroking into the crease of her leg and torso, and she tips her head back so she doesn’t have to look at him. All told, it’s a pretty good view, pleasure moving under his skin like water in a slow, rolling boil.

The set of her shoulder becomes very, very familiar in a single hot second, and he catches her wrist almost violently before her hand can make contact with his face.

“Oh no you don’t,” he tells her in a growl more amused than angry — the same tone one might use on a particularly adorable puppy that’s just tried to snap — and slams her hand wide to the mattress. It jerks her forward to lean right over him, forces her to brace high on his chest, all wide, startled eyes. It’s the work of a moment to roll them back over.

Or, at least it should be. Michael is curling his shoulder up and over, tilting his pelvis to move her without withdrawing, when Eleanor darts forward a few critical inches and sinks her teeth, hard and vicious, into his trapezius.

Michael… well, Michael is not entirely sure what happens next. He knows he feels skin break, knows he hisses, feels air escaping around his teeth, and then a sound rumbles out of him that he doesn’t have enough awareness to categorise. It all goes… rather _blank_ after that. When he does come back to himself, it must only be a handful of seconds later — six or seven at the absolute most.

He blinks, and there’s blood bubbling around his teeth. His lower jaw is braced against the underside of Eleanor’s collarbone and he’s biting deep, _breathing_ her, aspirating her blood and feeling her heartbeat hammering under his mouth. His hands, he notices with almost detached interest, are holding her mercilessly to the mattress.

The loss of control staggers him, and it takes him a moment to unlock his jaw from around the bone. His teeth have left huge imprints, seeming bigger than reality against the short stretch of her shoulder. It must hurt, it _must_ hurt, he had not been kind, but—

But Eleanor’s breathing is quick and strong, and so is she. She capitalizes ruthlessly on his moment of confusion, flipping them briskly and knocking his hands from her body. She sits astride him, the length of him still hard inside her, and they look at each other for a long moment.

Michael eyes her shoulder with professional regard. It’s precise and bloody, and he’s done a lot of damage — nothing he couldn’t fix, nothing that couldn’t be wished away, but (if he chose it) more than enough to scar. Nevertheless, Eleanor’s eyes are sharp and focused. There’s a thick smudge of red at the corner of her mouth and streaked along her chin, and something about that sight — blood and astride him and _above_ him — sets up a shivering home in Michael’s ribs, makes his fingers curl against her thighs. Eleanor, for her part, is also staring with a fixed intensity at her own blood smeared across most of the lower part of Michael's face. Something hot and vicious arcs through him. His eyes might flash; he’s not sure.

It’s the oldest story: blood and respect and power, and Michael feels his lip quirk wetly (bloodily) in what’s half a smile and half a snarl. He’d forgotten, _again_. Forgotten what it might mean to be in a human body, that he’s only _ever_ bitten her with human teeth, the damage that they can do. Human teeth always seem so blunt, right up until they aren’t, and the indentations in his shoulder sting with a bright, pulsing pain.

Eleanor closes her eyes and shudders. It’s a thick roll of movement that’s half to do with the short, helpless movements of her hips, grinding herself down on top of him, and half something else.

“Have we—” She swallows, opens her eyes, and meets his own with a bravado neither of them trust. “Have we done this before?”

Michael laughs. 

He laughs and laughs, laughs at the way his blood smeared across her face marks her as the adversary she has always been, laughs at the way the blood runs ignored down his shoulder and across her chest, impressions of teeth so human and vicious on each of them. Her blood has stained his teeth orange-red, his own blood long since washed out of hers, the iron taste of human flesh shared between them both. He thinks, just for a second, _there you are._

He’s still laughing, one hand on her waist, when he snaps his fingers. Her eyes, wide and shocked, never leave his.

-

Iteration eight-oh-two, it becomes rapidly apparent, is Michael’s last as the Architect of this place. Michael thought he might have more time, but he thinks he can work with what he has.

It’s easy enough to manoeuvre Eleanor and her little Scooby gang into his plans; he knows how to sell it to them now, knows their concerns and hesitations. There’s a sketchy few minutes in the middle where he has to gently help Eleanor steer herself away from the cocaine-packed train to the medium place, and he’s genuinely on the fence about whether or not he can actually sneak them into the _real_ good place, but in the end he sells it — at cost to his patience, but that’s okay, it’s a price he can afford to pay. Morality lessons with Chidi “Human Turtleneck” Anagonye still beat out burning on the surface of a billion suns, though he does spend a fraction of a second mulling it over.

Eleanor’s still not keen on ‘Team Cockroach’. Michael thinks it has a nice ring to it.

He’s certainly got work to do. He might be an incorporeal manifestation of hatred and sadism in a meat suitcase, but he meant what he said, as ever. He’ll try to get them all out to the real good place, and he’s got things to check, loopholes to test, and all under the ever-watchful gaze of Vicky and her motley contingent. It’s achieveable, he hopes. He really does.

Yes, Eleanor has him over a barrel with this; he’s not forgotten the casual blackmail of it all. She made the same argument in the now-forgotten iteration eight-oh-one, and he’s not surprised by it. If anything, he’s rather charmed — he has a fresh respect for her now, here, with the memory of the noise her human little teeth had made, wedging through the muscle of his shoulder.

He’s also not stupid enough to think that fucking Eleanor is ever really on the table again, not stupid enough to blow their fragile alliance sky-high on the back of his own desires or sadism. Not unless _she_ comes to him first, with no ambiguity or machinations on his part. One rule, remade: she must choose freely and without restriction, zero machinations to get her there, no manipulation whatsoever.

That feels… appropriate, somehow. Michael finds he’s okay with that, whatever she does or doesn’t choose. He watches her idly as she argues with the group about their next move, hands moving freely through the air, and thinks, _you know what, if I had to have an adversary-turned-ally, I could have done a hell of a lot worse than you._

Michael realises he’s been pressing his fingertips to his shoulder, a light touch on his trapezius where Eleanor’s small human teeth had rent his own flesh asunder. He lingers for a second like that, and realises with a brief jolt that she’s doing the same thing; she’s stroking short, absent lines over her collarbone, tracing the shape of a bite long-gone/never-there, even as she watches Tahani and Chidi hold a spirited debate about study timetabling. Her tongue is moving under her closed lips, as though looking for a flavour that’s missing against her teeth.

As if operating under an old, half-forgotten instinct, Eleanor slides her eyes over to Michael’s. Michael wonders, just for a moment, what it must be like to have more muscle memory than actual recollections, to feel and respond to a dozen mannerisms she may never remember — to be wired for things she doesn’t know about, to feel draws and pulls like the tide, unexpected gravitational constants.

Ally. Ally, and maybe friend. Michael can move forward with that.

Eleanor watches him, uneasily, narrow-eyed, and he grins like a skull.

–

Unbookmarked.

Siken, R. “Road Poetry”, stanza 2. Crush, Yale University Press, 2005.

        He could build a city. Has a certain capacity. There’s a niche in his chest

where a heart would fit perfectly

               and he thinks if he could just maneuver one into place —

                                                                                               well then, game over.

 

 


End file.
